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Creator Clips
Creator Clips were a feature that could be accessed through the Daily Pop. They detailed stories from the authors of famous book series. Ten Creator Clips were made in total, with each author writing two. __TOC__ Creator Clips Jeff Kinney Jeff Kinney is the author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Something I've Never Told Anyone "When I was in the fifth grade, I was jealous that some of the other boys in my class had girlfriends. So I decided I should have a girlfriend, too... even if it meant I had to make one up. So I found an old magazine at my house, found a picture of a pretty girl, and cut it out I brought it to school the next day and proudly showed off my picture of my new girlfriend, "Bunny." I carried on this lie for the whole school year. And then, on one of the last days, we had free reading time. Believe it or not, my teacher had the exact same magazine I had at home. One of the boys spotted my "girlfriend" on a page in the magazine, and ran over to me, excited. "Look, Jeff, there's a picture of your girlfriend!" I gulped. Then he read the caption at the bottom of the picture, which identified the girl by her real name, Brenda. "Wait a second," he said. "They spelled Bunny's name wrong!"" The Scariest Thing That Ever Happened to Me "My first job was at a small newspaper in Newburyport, Massachusetts. A few weeks after I arrived, I heard about a local hotel that was supposed to be haunted. I decided to put on my reporter's hat and go investigate. When I got to the Garrison Inn, I noticed that there were pennies strewn up and down the hallway. I asked the innkeeper why there were pennies in the hallway. She said, "Sarah leaves pennies on the ground when she gets a visitor." And by "Sarah," she meant the ghost of the little girl who haunted the hotel. When I got back to my apartment in Boston that night, I told my wife about it. She didn't believe in ghosts, so she was skeptical about the whole thing. But she was interested in the part about the pennies. "What time was your interview?" she asked. "3:00," I said. Well, at 3:00, she had taken a study break and had left the room. When she came back, there were pennies all over the floor!" Shannon Hale Shannon Hale is the author of Rapunzel's Revenge and other fantasy fiction. The Best Gift I Ever Got "When I was ten years old, my parents bought us our first computer. Personal computers were pretty new then. This was an Apple IIe. Monitors didn't have color, and all the text and pictures were green. We had some games, though they were very simple, and some might say, lame. It was on this computer that I first started to write books, using a program called Bank Street Writer. I began four books that year and various short stories. Typing the words onto a screen felt so much more real to me than writing them on paper. I believed I really could become an author. Twenty-nine years later I published my first novel, The Goose Girl. It won an award given by Bank Street College, the same organization that made the program I used to write my very first book at age ten." The Worst Job I Ever Had "The title had sounded so promising: "Talk Radio Show Producer." Wow, a producer! Of a show on the radio! Glamor! Excitement! Entertainment! Um... Part of my job was to screen callers and pick the ones to go on the air. The thing was, no one called. I suspect this was because no one was listening. I couldn't blame them. To be honest, the host was boring. At least the occasional listener couldn't see the hearty dusting of dandruff on his shoulders and food scum in the corners of his mouth. I could. And not to get graphic, but the show's engineer had suspicious brown stains on the seat of his pants. The dandruff and food scum and lack of listeners might have been okay, but the host skipped town after two months and never paid me a dime. I never heard from him again. Word to the wise: Insist on weekly checks!" Mary Pope Osborne Mary Pope Osborne is the author of the Magic Treehouse series. A Funny Thing That Happened to Me as a Kid "The summer between fifth and sixth grade, for some reason which I'll never understand, I joined a girl's softball league, even though I had absolutely no skills as a baseball player. I had no skills for any kind of sport. But that never kept me from trying. On the days I had a softball game, I'd walk around the house, or lie on my bed, chewing gum and punching my fist into my glove, dreading what was to come, feeling sick about it, even. I'd have butterflies in my stomach and a tightness in my chest. But I never considered not showing up. I never missed a game. The coach, out of kindness, always stuck me way out in the left field where nothing ever took place. I'd stand out there, still punching my glove and still chewing gum, desperately afraid a ball might come my way. Well, one day it did: Someone cracked a fly ball and it came arching through the sky, over the pitcher's head, over the shortstop's head out toward me. I was so in shock, I could hardly move. But it didn't matter. I just stuck out my glove and the ball landed in it. The game was over. Our team won. It sounds like a movie, but it was real. I was a hero that day. Kids slapped me on the back. Some friend of my parents' even called them to report my heroism. It was the one and only time in my life that sports treated me well." The Best Gift I Ever Got "When I was in second grade, I got the best gift I've ever gotten: a pair of mouse ears. They were made of black plastic and attached to a little black hat. They were just like the mouse ears that the kid actors wore on TV when they performed on the Mickey Mouse Club show every weekday afternoon. This gang of mouse-eared kids did a lot of singing and dancing. Sometimes they pretended to ride horses. And at least once a show, they paraded in front of the camera and shouted out their names: "Cubby!" "Annette!" "Darlene!" "Bobby!" By owning my own pair of mouse ears, I could imagine that I myself was a member of that troupe of dancing, singing kids. The black plastic ears unleashed my imagination so that I could very believably dance and sing along with them – except I wasn’t exactly with them. I was alone in my bedroom in a house on an Army post in Virginia. But after I received the mouse ears, I began tap-dancing and singing every day in front of my dresser mirror. And I waved countless times, calling out, "Mary!" I even tried making a wig out of paper that I colored brown – because none of the Mouseketeers had blond curly hair like mine. The mouse ears made it so real. To this day I feel as if I were actually on TV back then. I was that girl with the strange paper hair, remember her?" Lincoln Peirce Lincoln Peirce is the author of the Big Nate series. The Most Embarrassing Thing That Ever Happened to Me "In the town where I grew up, there was a public outdoor swimming pool. Since there wasn't much else to do on hot summer days, I'd often spend the whole day at the pool. One afternoon, I'd just finished eating my bag lunch when I noticed that the drawstring of my bathing suit had come untied. One end of it had receded deep into the fabric of my suit, which now felt uncomfortably loose. I sat on my blanket near the edge of the water for half an hour, trying to get the string back out. Finally I gave up. I'd have to go home and ask my mom to fix it. But by now I was hot; I decided to sneak in one more quick dip before heading home. As I floated out toward the deeper section of the pool where the water was cooler, holding my bathing suit in place with one hand and paddling with the other, a couple of kids followed me. I didn't know them. All I knew was that before I realized what was happening, they swam up behind me and yanked my bathing suit off. Then they quickly got out of the pool and threw my suit over the chain link fence and into some bushes. I was floating in the middle of the public pool, butt-naked! To my relief, nobody seemed to be paying attention. But I didn't know what to do. There was no way I could get to my towel without being seen, and I couldn't stay in the pool forever. Then I saw the lifeguard, sitting atop her tower by the diving board. I decided she was my only hope. I waved at her -- a wave somewhere between "hi, how ya doin'" and "help me, I'm drowning." She finally noticed me. She must have realized I wasn't in any real danger, because she didn't come to my rescue in a lifeguard-y kind of way. She climbed slowly down from her tower and started to swim out to where I was treading water. When she got to within about ten feet of me, I said five words: "Some kids took my suit." She looked at me for a few moments, then said, "wait here." (As if I might actually go somewhere!) A minute later, she was back, pulling a towel behind her. Trying to act as casual as possible, I pushed the towel underwater, held it around my waist as best I could, and kicked for shore. There was only one problem: whenever a lifeguard goes into the pool, people stop and watch. So as she and I came out of the water, there were a couple hundred sets of eyes watching my every move. Somebody, probably trying to be funny, started to applaud, and pretty soon everyone was clapping. I wrapped my own dry towel around me, packed up my stuff, and ran to my bike. I didn't bother looking for my suit once I got outside the fence. I just rode home as fast as I could. From then on, I always made sure the drawstring on my bathing suit was double-knotted." Ultimate Showdown This Creator Clip is a bracket tournament between different types of candy. *Round 1: Kit Kat, Skittles, Peanut M&Ms, Snickers, Good & Plenty, Butterfinger sic, Junior Mints, Reese's Cups *Round 2: Skittles, Snickers, Butterfinger sic, Reese's Cups *Round 3: Snickers, Reese's Cups *Winner: Reese's Cups Rick Riordan Rick Riordan is the author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. A Bad Vacation Story "I was never much of a camper, but my dad loved to take me on camping trips. Once when I was about seven, he took me to the Bastrop Woods in Central Texas. We pitched a tent and lit a campfire. He cooked some stew in a big pot and while we ate dinner he told me some scary stories. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, because I could barely sleep that night. Around midnight, I was sure I heard somebody rustling through our campsite. I heard growling and hissing. I was terrified, but my dad would barely wake up. He mumbled that it was my imagination and told me to go back to sleep. In the morning, we found out we had indeed had visitors. Raccoons had gotten into the stewpot, and they’d left little stew-stained paw prints all over our tent, our car – pretty much everywhere you can imagine. It looked like they’d had quite a party. I was glad to discover our visitors were raccoons and not ghosts, but still, I can never go camping without thinking about stew-prints and growling in the night." The Scariest Thing That Ever Happened to Me "When I was a kid, I was sure that a ghost lived in my closet. This feeling was made worse by the fact that there was a trapdoor in the closet floor that lead to the crawlspace under the house. My parents assured me there was nothing down there, but I would lie awake at night watching the closet door, waiting for it to open. One night, my worst fears were confirmed. I woke up and the closet door was open. The trap door rose up, and this dark shape was moving around in the opening, with eerie light shining around it. I screamed at the top of my lungs and ran out of the room, straight down the hall and into my parents’ bed. My mom had a terrible time calming me down. Finally she took me back to my room and introduced me to the ghost in my closet. It was just my dad. A pipe had burst in the middle of the night and he was looking under the house with a flashlight trying to fix the problem. Did that make me feel better? Maybe a little. But I still hated sleeping with the closet door open, and I made my dad promise to wake me up next time he had to use the crawlspace in the middle of the night!" Gallery A Bad Vacation Story.jpg A Funny Thing That Happened to Me as a Kid.jpg Something I've Never Told Anyone.jpg The Best Gift I Ever Got.jpg The Most Embarrassing Thing That Ever Happened to Me.jpg The Scariest Thing That Ever Happened to Me.jpg The Worst Job I Ever Had.jpg Ultimate Showdown.jpg Category:Features